America’s baby bust has been a pertinent issue for years, but that’s not all, another flashing statistic shows that Americans aren’t getting laid either these days. According to a 2025 report by the Institute for Family Studies only 37% of Americans aged 18–64 said they have sex weekly in 2024, a long fall from 55% in 1990.
To describe this broad decline researchers have coined the term “sex recession” and it’s no longer limited to stereotypical lonely young men or doomed dating. Even married couples are no longer reliable contributors to the population count. It worked out fine for them between 1996 and 2008, when 59% of married adults were knocking boots at least once a week. However, from 2010 to 2024, that number dropped down to 49%.
As of May 2026, roughly 33.1% of adults reported being sexually inactive, as opposed to only 4.8% said they were having sex three times a week, accentuating how inconsistent intimacy has become for many Americans.
Screen time over baby time
The country’s shrinking sex life is less about the question of morality and more about isolation. According to the Institute for Family Studies, the average time of young adults spent with friends went down from 12.8 hours in 2010 to just 6.5 hours a week by 2019. This decline even continued after the end of pandemic, with a meager recovery for social time to 5.1 hours weekly in 2024.
More scrolling it seems has led to less socializing, which by extension means fewer opportunities for relationships to begin. Sociologist Mark Regnerus said smartphones are slowly taking the place of time usually spent on dating, flirting, or looking for a platonic/romantic relationship. Meanwhile, therapists who sat down with The Wall Street Journal are holding everything from “bed rotting” to economic anxiety responsible for declining libido.
Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office is now projecting America’s fertility rate to average just 1.6 births per woman over the next three decades which is well below the 2.1 births needed to prevent population shrinkage without immigration.
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